What does DSA’s National Political Committee (NPC) do, exactly? You may know that the NPC is the highest elected leadership body between national conventions and that, unlike in the nonprofit model, this elected body sets the political direction of the organization, rather than senior staff doing so. You may even know that the NPC approves national electoral endorsements, passes a budget, and sits on DSA’s issue-based national committees. But you’d be forgiven if you weren’t sure what the NPC does day to day. Even members of the NPC disagree about what their job is.
What the NPC Does
I’ve sat on the NPC for about eight months now, and I offer this short definition of what we do: we direct the national organization’s limited resources, in service of the political and organizational projects that the convention and NPC deem important.
The most tangible resource is member dues. Dues fund our staff (27 full-time and growing), office, tech tools, big events, national phone and text banks, and legal fees. DSA is currently a $9 million organization. Other resources include staff time, outward-facing communications (social and any press hits on TV or newspapers), and member-facing communications (emails that go to all of our 100,000 members).
How we spend those resources is hotly contested. Broadly speaking, the “left” and “right” of DSA each controlled about 40% of votes at our 2025 convention. “Center” (including Bread & Roses) and independent votes made up the remaining 20%. On the NPC, the dynamic is the same: neither the left nor right has the votes to create a majority on their own, so they need the center votes to swing their way – and Bread & Roses’ three NPC members often constitute that center vote.
This is a sticky state of affairs. In Bread & Roses, we believe firmly in the virtues of DSA’s “big tent.” However, that big tent involves what can feel like irreconcilable contradictions, particularly on our differing theories of change.
Broadly, the right of the organization focuses on growing DSA’s membership and standing as a presence in U.S. politics – even when that means compromises, like endorsing candidates who have less-than-perfect records or less-than-perfect messaging on core socialist issues. The DSA left, on the other hand, guided by a focus on anti-imperialism and especially anti-Zionism, sees enforcing discipline about our positions, especially on our endorsed electeds, as a key part of how DSA should present our politics to the world. Both the left and the right acknowledge that governing as socialists under capitalism presents us with a myriad of contradictions. It’s in the prescriptions for how to navigate these contradictions – or whether we should engage at all – that their visions differ substantially. The debate over how to approach a possible DSA presidential endorsement is just the latest expression of these conflicting theories of change. When two large portions of the leadership espouse opposed visions for what DSA should be and do in the world, it’s hard to see eye-to-eye on a budget, where we theoretically choose to allocate the most money to the things we think are most important.
So, how has the NPC chosen to allocate DSA’s resources, given these tensions? Unfortunately, the answer to that – up until a few weeks ago – was, “we haven’t.”
A Primarily Reactive Body Can’t Beat Capitalism
Many things are broken on the NPC, but perhaps the most important is that we don’t have a long-term strategy for DSA. We began the term in 2025 without any attempt to set priorities. Instead, we’ve spent our time reacting. The reacting we do might be to a new U.S. war, or just to a new resolution that a caucus has put forward, or to a deadline for seating a national body that sneaks up on us.
In January 2026, the NPC passed a budget that broadly made the left, right, and center happy, without meaningfully talking about how this budget would reflect our priorities. Because the organization had the luxury of a good deal of money to allocate, due to our recent membership boom, we could simply vote yes to each wing’s priorities, rather than trying to synthesize them into a cohesive whole, or rejecting some in favor of others.
Meanwhile, DSA’s directors of organizing, development, finance, communication, and operations have been politely imploring the NPC to set some priorities. They report that the volume of work the NPC has passed – by approving dozens of piecemeal resolutions for new areas of work – is more than our staff could ever carry out. These new work areas run the gamut from “we will create ongoing national communications about affordability” to “we will form a new national body focusing on organizational security” to “we will create a new travel fund for members.” Until recently, the NPC had given directors no guidance on what to choose when they have to pick which issues and projects to allocate staff time or money to, so directors ended up treating requests from the NPC first-come-first-serve. Directors are reporting unprecedented levels of overwork and burnout during this NPC term due to the high volume of new requests coming in.
This lack of direction is a sorry state of affairs for the largest socialist organization the U.S. has seen in decades. We have no shared analysis of the political moment and how DSA should direct its resources to meet it, let alone proactively shape it. Horizontalism and decentralization are still entrenched in DSA, and they’re not synonymous with member leadership in an organization. Democracy shouldn’t mean everyone gets to do everything; it should mean we decide on a political vision, and sometimes minority visions lose. Members have to be willing to accept decisions they don’t like.
It matters whether DSA has a long-term plan. The right wing has had a long-term plan for decades, and they’ve totally reshaped the political landscape and how regular people think. Capital has mind-boggling resources — orders of magnitude more than we’ll ever have — and we won’t constitute a threat to them if we primarily react.
What Happened When Bread & Roses Tried to Pass Priorities
Bread & Roses’ three NPC members first brought up the need for priorities at the current NPC’s first in-person meeting, in November 2025. If we were seated in August, why did it take so long to discuss them? One crucial thing to understand about the NPC is that basic admin work moves slowly. For many weeks after the body was seated, there was no plan or date even to have our first meeting; I stepped in and offered to be the body’s meeting scheduler. So the fact that the question of priorities didn’t make it to a meeting agenda until November was not out of the ordinary.
The question came up again in January 2026, when Bread & Roses NPC member Hayley convened a special NPC meeting to discuss all of the projects that convention and the NPC had passed, and who was bottom-lining them. The meeting’s second half was supposed to be about setting priorities for the term, but we cut it short because it conflicted with a rapid response mass call on the war in Venezuela for DSA members and the public. (Here’s that dynamic again: long-term planning gets the back seat to rapid response and even non-important things that happen to pop up.)
Coming out of that meeting, the NPC Steering Committee, a smaller body of nine NPCers that meets and votes on business every two weeks, was tasked with coming up with a process to set priorities. Unfortunately, this work didn’t become a shared project of the Steering Committee; I didn’t see any proactive moves on the question other than my own. In February, I asked every tendency to come to a Steering meeting with their top three national priorities for DSA, just to get a loose draft started. To my happy surprise, almost all tendencies agreed on four core DSA priorities: anti-war organizing; anti-ICE/immigrant defense organizing; electoral work, especially the 2026 Congressional races; and labor work, especially preparing for May Day 2028.
One concern in this discussion was that we had no shared definition of a priority and how it intersected with DSA’s staff time or money. Based on that input, I drafted a resolution that named the four issue areas as priorities. For a long time, it went nowhere. It got agendized on several Steering and NPC meetings, only for us to reach the end of our allotted meeting time without discussing it or voting to extend the meeting time to discuss it.
Since the body wasn’t showing much interest, I realized that the NPC’s various caucuses probably needed to hear the proactive case for priorities, so I checked in with each caucus – Bread & Roses has a separate group chat with each other caucus’s NPCers. I heard the following objections and did my best to address them in communications with the NPC.
Objection 1: Why should I vote for this resolution establishing interim priorities? Codifying our existing priorities doesn’t do much, won’t give directors the specific guidance they need, etc.
Objection 2: Even if we write down our priorities, the NPC is unlikely to carry them out; NPCers will still put their time into their own individual/caucus priorities. Another way of putting this: we don’t have the political coherence to move as one body.
Objection 3: This document isn’t specific enough.
Objection 4: It’ll be hard to set priorities for 1-2 years out, or even find the time to debate and vote on them, on a body so focused on rapid response.
Based on feedback, I also updated the language of the resolution so that it committed the NPC – specifically, the national co-chairs, working with a subcommittee called the Co-Chair Support Committee, of which I’m a member – to pass a more in-depth strategy and implementation document by August 31, 2026, so that our Budget and Finance Committee can have priorities in place when it begins the 2027 budget process in September 2026.
The intent was to pass a stopgap measure that would set some guidance, relieve overburdened directors, and move us away from reacting and into acting with intention, but the four priorities as written were intended to be interim, and the longer document in August will flesh out things like second- and third-tier priorities and the relationship between priority designation and resource allocation.
We Finally Passed Priorities
At the NPC’s April meeting the priorities resolution passed 16-5 with one minor amendment to clarify the electoral component.
We did still hear from some tendencies that passing priorities wasn’t necessary, or that it was going to mean the areas they focused on would be existentially threatened. MUG in particular advocated for continuing to pass items piecemeal. Members of Springs of Revolution (SOR) said they feared setting priorities would provide an excuse for the organization not to give resources to any items not reflected in the top four items, especially organizational security.
The majority was 16 yeses from the right and center, including Socialist Majority Caucus, Groundwork, Bread & Roses, and Reform and Revolution, along with independents Abdullah F. and Sara A. Five NPCers voted against, including MUG, Libertarian Socialist Caucus, and one member of SOR. The remaining five votes – from Red Star and the remainder of SOR – were abstentions. Passing priorities by a wide margin is a much better outcome than a 14-13 vote — something that happens all the time on this NPC — and a huge positive step for DSA.
Now that DSA has interim national priorities, some decisions about allocating our resources become easier. For instance, if three committees all want to send an email to all 100,000 members, but there’s only room in the calendar for one, it’ll be clear to comms staff that the committee corresponding to a national priority should get the slot. If a committee approaches Budget and Finance asking them to approve, e.g., a large graphic design expense, the committee won’t have to respond with “We can afford it, but we don’t know if it’s important.” Instead, they can approve or reject the expense based on whether it’s related to one of our four priorities.
Perhaps most salient, when the organizing department approaches the NPC asking how to allocate Regional Organizers’ currently unassigned work hours, the NPC can choose which committees or projects to assign. Committees like Abolish ICE get extra staff support, and DSA’s anti-ICE work is that much stronger.
Having interim priorities doesn’t fix everything, of course; while it’s an important step, it can’t substitute for a coherent, intentional national strategy.
Now, the real work begins. The co-chairs and Co-Chair Support Committee will buckle down and figure out exactly which strategic interventions to propose that DSA should make and how – based on the will of the body at convention – for the remainder of this NPC term. If DSA is going to be an organized mass force for socialism, it matters that we do the hard work of thinking long-term.
